Thursday, October 25, 2012

941. Industrial Fishing: Scraping the Bottom of the Ocean Smooth

The following is the New York Times October 22, 2012 editorial. Two elements are missing from it. First, that industrial fishing is a capitalist industry driven by insatiable drive for profits. Second, that it should be phased out. Otherwise, it points to a massive problem facing anyone who cares about biodiversity and health of oceans. KN

A trawler at the bottom of the sea

* * *

It is hard to grasp
just how industrialized commercial fishing has become. You may know about the
problems inherent in fish farming. You may have read some of the stunning
accounts of work aboard the factory ships that catch, process and freeze fish.
But there is no better way to grasp the scale of industrial fishing than to
consider the impact of bottom trawling.

According to a new study published in Nature, trawlers are
doing more than catching fish. Because they drag huge, heavy nets across the
ocean floor, they are reshaping the bottom contours of the busiest fishing
grounds. It is the equivalent of plowing a cornfield, with this difference: a
farmer plows his own field once a year, but trawlers cover “the same grounds
year round on a daily basis.” By disturbing sediment, they are, in essence,
smoothing out the sea bottom and reducing its value as habitat. This is
occurring, the authors say, not just on relatively shallow continental shelves,
but on continental slopes as well.

Heavy trawling takes place all around the world, including off the
coasts of the United States. In the scientists’ study area — the Mediterranean
Sea near Spain — bathymetric mapping shows the smoothing caused by the steady
sifting of sediment, and underwater photographs clearly depict trawler drag
marks. In fact, trawlers are shifting as much sediment as naturally occurring
underwater landslides. Trawlers working on continental slopes alone cover about
half the area of the United States. Globally, trawlers working on all
continental shelves and seamounts cover about five times that area.

These estimates are conservative. As the authors note, the regulations
governing deep-sea bottom trawling are very weak, and there is a great deal of
illegal and underreported fishing going on. Marine life flourishes in
complexity, which bottom trawling destroys. It will take strong international
regulation, a reduction in European fishing subsidies and heightened consumer
awareness in order to limit, if not halt, this disastrous scraping of the
seafloor.